Marketing Tech Stack: What It Is and Why Your Business Needs It

However, you’ll need to ensure that your technologies align with your marketing strategy to enjoy the benefits of Marketing Tech Stack (MTS). In the prevailing market conditions, it’s no secret that technology and marketing go hand in hand like ketchup and mustard (or say gin and tonic).

They are like a naturally paired duo that enhances the overall performance of an organization. Today, it’s almost impossible for marketers to undertake their tasks without the right marketing strategies and technologies in their arsenal.

That said, the marketing technology landscape is ever-changing. Every other day, new technologies are innovated and added to the thousands of tools that are already in existence. One of the most daunting tasks that marketers have to contend with is selecting the right mix of marketing tools and technologies from this vast pool.

This is where Marketing Tech Stack chips in. Ahead is a complete guide to what a marketing tech stack is and why your business needs it. Let’s dive in.

What is Marketing Tech Stack (MTS)?

Marketing Tech Stack (martech) is a group of tools marketers use to execute various marketing campaigns—from search engine optimization to social media management, from email marketing to lead generation.

Different marketing technologies are stacked to build an integrated series of tools that enable marketers to develop seamless customer relationships across various channels. As such, it helps enhance multiple aspects of your marketing strategies, including increasing the efficiency of your marketing spend.

Elements of Marketing Tech Stack (MTS)

Another critical factor to consider is your target market B2B businesses will require slightly different technologies than B2C businesses, given that they use other techniques and channels to acquire and engage with customers.

Below is a look at elements of the marketing technology stack to consider regardless of your target clients:

• Content Management System (CMS): This element powers your blog, website, landing pages, etc. Having a sound, CMS is vital to ensuring that you have better engagement with your customers.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): This MTS element tracks all marketing attribution and customer relationships for a business’s marketing team. Ultimately, it helps you gain valuable insights into how your marketing strategies affect your sales pipeline.
• Email Marketing: The use of emails in your marketing efforts is still arguably one of the most cost-friendly ways of building your brand, increasing sales, and gaining the trust of your client base
• Advertising and SEO: This element is crucial to your customer acquisition efforts, regardless of the type of business you deal in. Today, marketers use a combination of software for ad tracking, keyword research, ad display, and attribution.
• Social Media: Various technologies in this space enable you to curate content, schedule posts, or monitor your social media conversations. Networks like LinkedIn and Facebook also offer you marketing opportunities that can complement your digital marketing tech stack.
• Collaboration: This tool is geared towards ensuring that your team works efficiently and transparently.
• Analysis and Reporting: These include tools like Google Analytics that enable you to access your data to assess how efficient your marketing efforts are.

How to Build a Marketing Technology Stack

There isn’t an out-of-the-box way of creating an MTS. Every business is unique and has its own marketing needs. As such, there’s a minimal chance that your MTS will look exactly like someone else’s. That said, choosing the right tools can help you build a marketing technology stack that’s perfect for your business. To do that, you’ll need to take the following steps:

• Identify your primary marketing strategies and objectives: Outline the basic strategies you want to implement to better gauge the tools you’ll need from the word go.
• Conduct a survey of your team to identify their strengths and challenges: Sit down with your team and gather details on matters such as the activities that add more time to their workflow and make their job more difficult. Try to connect their challenges and strengths to your marketing goals.
• Establish an estimated budget: Ensure that your business has a sufficient budget for creating the MTS you have in mind.
• Research the tools you’ll need for your MTS: For instance, you can look at the best CMS or analysis and reporting tools that best suit your business.
• Consider adding non-marketing tools: Explore collaboration platforms, data sync software, and project management tools.
• Compile the data that you’ll need to create the marketing tech stack (MTS).
• Assign a team member to make a workflow per tool: This will help you establish the best way of using the devices without a lot of guesswork.
• Analyze how effective the tools are and switch them if need be: Are the tools working efficiently? If not, you may need to shake things up to improve your tech stack marketing efficiency.

Reasons for Investing in Marketing Tech Stack (MTS)

Your marketing tech stack is vital to the success of your business. Among the benefits that you’ll accrue from it include:

• It helps you increase brand visibility.
• It enables you to better coordinate and execute your marketing campaigns.
• It allows you to leverage existing content and not only attract but convert customers.
• It helps in improving the bottom line of your business via more efficient marketing, hence increasing sales.
• It enables you to reach a wider audience.

How Does Your MTS Change in 2021?

In 2021, businesses are thinking of ways to attract and engage with customers in a more personalized manner. Rather than employing the “Shiny Penny Approach,” which involves marketing leaders adopting every new tool on the market, marketing leaders are focusing on finding new ways to take advantage of the technological capabilities they currently possess.

• Marketing leaders are strategically auditing their tech stack digital marketing software to improve the efficacy of their technology’s portfolio and ensure that it aligns with their organization’s roadmap.
• Businesses are enhancing their digital tech stack platform ecosystems with tools that work seamlessly together to allow for frictionless collaboration amongst cross-functional teams.
• Companies are refining their automation with data to enhance the relevance of their self-serve and human support at every stage of a customer’s buying journey. Here are some of the emerging trends in the Marketing Technology Stack.

Strategy First, then Technology Follows

Technology is not a magic bullet. When preparing to build a marketing technology stack, your first step would probably be to research various technologies and compare prices and set features. You could even go ahead and kick a few tires with a free trial to assess their suitability.

However, a technological tool is not a strategy. A marketing software’s value is in the approach and process it enables and its impact on customer experience. Before updating or building your digital marketing tech stack, you must develop your marketing strategy. Ensure that you shape this strategy to match your product, desired audience, and ways of reaching them. Trying to implement a strategy that doesn’t fit your technology will blow back in your face.

Conclusion

Building the best marketing tech stack for your business is no easy task. To achieve this feat, you need to integrate the right technologies to work in sync with each other. Only then will you get a comprehensive insight into your marketing efforts and customer journey. Additionally, you’ll discover ways of optimizing your hard-earned marketing profits.

TheExpertCafé can help you determine how effective your marketing strategies are

Are you a marketer looking to assess how efficient your marketing efforts are? TheExpertCafé can help you towards that end. We are a US-based B2B group of marketers that research the niche marketing sections.

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